Donald Trump bungled an online tirade torching a Fox News host who dared question one of the D.C. vanity projects sucking up all the president’s time even as his party faces a bloodbath at the midterms.
“Why didn’t Shannon Bream, ‘Milktoast’ to her friends, show the updated pictures instead of ones that were so old and irrelevant?” the 80-year-old raged on Truth Social after the network mainstay’s Sunday comments about his White House ballroom.
Bream, 55, isn’t “milktoast” to anyone because the word is, in fact, spelled “milquetoast.” It comes from the comic strip character Caspar Milquetoast, not an imaginary dairy product. Merriam-Webster also defines it as meaning a “timid, meek, or unassertive person,” which hardly fits Bream’s candid effort to wrangle any sense at all from Trump’s obsession with the East Wing annex.
She pointed out during an interview with Attorney General Todd Blanche that the president is charging ahead with construction despite a D.C. District Court ruling earlier this month that he must either stop or get congressional authorization to continue. The White House is appealing that decision rather than taking the issue to the House.
“Why not just go to Congress?” Bream asked Blanche. “We don’t believe we have to go to Congress,” Blanche, a former personal attorney to the president who’s now the nation’s top prosecutor, shot back.
Trump’s post was the second part of a one-two online attack after Bream’s show aired on Sunday morning. In his first post, he moaned that “watching Fox News with Shannon Bream is always like watching the Worst of Fake News CNN” while falsely claiming that her ratings had started to “fall.” In his second, he went even further, bizarrely suggesting that “her show, Fox News Sunday, is so biased against MAGA, ‘TRUMP,’ and Republicans, that it is ridiculous!”
It’s not the first time Trump has gone for the host—nor lost the spelling bee in doing so. He similarly attacked her as “Milk Toast Shannon Bream” in a vitriolic June Truth Social for supposedly not doing enough to defend his record on immigration enforcement.
He also doesn’t reserve it exclusively for her. He’s used it to go after Bream’s fellow Fox mainstay Kayleigh McEnany, who served as his press secretary during his first term. Both women are only two targets in a wider pattern of attacks on female journalists that has included calling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “the worst reporter” and telling Bloomberg News correspondent Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy.”
Bream’s queries about the White House ballroom are hardly unjustified. Trump’s continuing fixation with the project and other MAGAfication efforts around the nation’s capital, all deeply unpopular with voters more concerned about his war with Iran and the soaring cost of living at home, has left pundits and pollsters wondering what the president actually trying to lose GOP control of the House and Senate at midterms might look like.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
